Caricature and Kierkegaard

I wrote a survey article on “Caricature and Comics” for The Routledge Companion To Comics. (I’m sorry to say that the volume is currently very overpriced, although I trust in a few years they will release a more modestly-priced paperpack version, and the Kindle version price shall descend from the heavens, where it dwells.) However, Routledge allows authors to self-archive, so I did. Abstract:

Caricature and comics are elastic categories. This essay treats caricature not as a type or aspect of comics but as a window through which we can view comics in relation to the broader European visual art tradition. Caricature is exaggeration. But all art exaggerates, insofar as it stylizes. Is all art caricature, since all has ‘style’? Ernst Gombrich’s classic Art and Illusion comes close to arguing so. This article conjoins critical reflections on Gombrich’s discussion of ‘the experiment of caricature’ with a survey of art historical paradigm cases. It makes sense for comics to emerge from this mix.

And this seems like a nice occasion to showcase the newest addition to my small, but growing set of philosophical caricatures. Soren Kierkegaard!

It’s a bit tricky knowing what folks looked like in the past. It was so long ago. No photographs. The familiar portraits of Kierkegaard show him as fine featured and handsome, but one suspects artists may have idealized in the direction of conventional beauty. Contemporary caricatures were rather vicious, notoriously. Here is a description from a nephew (from Encounters With Kierkegaard):

“On the little pencil drawing of him that I own, the nose has been given a somewhat too elegant and aristocratic turn … Uncle Soren’s nose, though crooked, was bolder and more substantial. On the other hand, the mouth, eyes, the entire form of the head, and the abundance of the hair are a splendid likeness. His posture is also typical. His mouth was large, but at the same time, what a range of different moods found expression in its curves and lines, all the way from soft sadness and tenderness to spirited contrariness or refined irony – and this latter was not the least dominant trait! And then his eyes, which lost nothing over the years; on the contrary, their naturally soulful expression gained such an intensified brilliance that they shone like stars when I took leave of him out at the hospital.”

Everyone agrees his hair stood straight on end! I fear that, in making his nose a bit thicker and his eyes a bit larger I have made him horse-faced. Ah, well. Too late now. But I think I did a good job on the mouth. I was trying to do a thing where, if you look at it once, it’s deadpan serious; look at it again, it’s smiling ironically. Who cares about the nose? It’s the mouth that is philosophical in this case. In other cases, it’s the nose. A quote from my survey article: “Nixon looked like his policies. His nose told you he was going to invade Cambodia.” By contrast, only Kierkegaard’s mouth told you he was going to refute Hegel.

“We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of caricature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson